I've just put the final spit polish on chapter one of Sister Mine. (There are currently seven chapters in all.) On to chapter two now, then a break for lunch. Some words;

"Yoplait here just wandered in off the street one day. Got into the kitchen, was helping himself to our bacon when I caught him. He was nothing but fur and bones. I let him finish the bacon, and he just stayed. Finally let me get close enough to him to touch him. Nowadays I have to watch where I put my feet when I roll out of bed in the mornings. Yoplait has a way of leaving four or five still-bleeding mouse torsos right where I'll step."
I grimaced. "Gross."
"I know. Scared me shitless the first time it happened. Maybe it's his way of paying rent, I dunno. He arranges them neatly in a row for me. Just their front halves. Their heads and their little front legs. I guess the back halves are meatier. I think he eats those. At least, I've never found any hairy mouse butts hanging around."
“My dad used to bring live mice into the house. I mean, they would come looking for him.” I realized my slip-up when I saw Brie’s startled face. I tried to think up a reasonable explanation.
"Brie!" yelled a voice from outside. "We're starting up again!"
Brie called out, “Okay, just a second!” He stood up.
Whew. Saved by the bellow. I was going to have keep a close watch on what I said.

I just used the word hemi-demi-semiquaver in a sentence. In the plural. Along with concatenation. And "hyena." It may all be too much for one sentence to carry, but I'm so tickled with it that I'll let it stand for now.

Just finished chapter 5, scene 1 of my final-but-one rewrite of novel Sister Mine. At the moment, there are seven chapters in all.

Here's a snippet, although I think I may have posted a version of this before:

His smile was wry. "There are two forty-year-olds in a parked car over the next ridge. One man, one woman. They're both divorced. From each other. Indulging in a bit of angry breakup sex. Neither one of them has made out in the back of a car since they were teenagers. They're mature adults and they know what's what, so they're using a rubber, but wait for it..." he held up a bony forefinger, looked up and to the side as though he was listening for something. "Ah. There it goes. The condom just broke."

"And what's going to be the result this time?" I asked him. "Birth, or death?" He was a two-way ferryman, after all. But sometimes it wasn't so much fun, getting a peek into Uncle's job.

"It’ll be birth. Two births, in fact. When she learns that she's pregnant, she's going to tell her shrink, who's going to go out that same evening and knock his girlfriend up. Bim-bam. And now a mile over yonder, a man has just beaten his dentist to death with a frozen fish. Happens more often than you'd think. It's a kind of ludicrous situation."

Despite an achy, unpromising start, I had a not bad day of rewrite today. *Relief*

And here are some recent reviews of The Chaos:

From The Book Smugglers

From Darlene's Book Nook

From Stephanie Barbe Hammer; Ready! Set! Unreal!

From Lee Skallerup; The Chaos of Being Young, Black, and Female – Before and After the Apocalypse

My publisher tells me that the following starred review will be out in the May 1, 2012 issue of Booklist;

The Chaos

By Nalo Hopkinson

(McElderry; ISBN 9781416954880; April 2012; Spring catalog p. 86)

Award-winning author Hopkinson’s YA debut begins like the standard outsider-with-issues tale—well, mostly. Sure, 16-year-old, multiracial Scotch Smith is fighting with her best friend over an ex-boyfriend, and the ’rents are driving her nuts, but it’s those tar-black blemishes that the doctor can’t cure and her visions of floating horse heads that really worry her. Then the world is enveloped by the Chaos, and the story sails off into something weirdly wonderful. A huge erupting bubble absorbs her brother, a volcano rises out of a lake, and a smelly Sasquatch walks the streets of Scotch’s hometown of Toronto. As streetlights turn into giant yellow highlighters, grass turns to cheese, and Big Ben sings dirty songs, Scotch realizes that “everyone can now see the madness they all carry around with them.” Frantic to save her brother, Scotch dodges a toothed tar ball as she races around the city, assisted by Baba Yaga. Hopkinson, who grew up in the Caribbean, mixes Jamaican legends, fairy tales, and sheer imagination to create this wildly inventive story that also skillfully addresses essential teen subjects: change, race, identity, love, and understanding cultural differences. Labels are impossible here, so just hand this refreshingly original treat to teens eager for something completely different.

The Chaos is finally out! To celebrate the occasion, Fantasy Matters asked me to do a book birthday blog post. I'm also doing a blog tour, courtesy Simon & Schuster Canada. My first "appearance" is up today on Emilie's Book World.

And do show your local indie bookstores some love! If you're going to buy the book, consider getting it from an independent bookstore in your location. There are more indie bookstores than I could ever list, but I've buried links to a handful of them in this post. To find your local stores in Canada and the U.S., try Indie Store Finder.

I made a book!

Still working on the rewrite of Sister Mine. I got totally bogged down about a third of the way through in a tangle of contradictory plot points that I couldn't resolve. Each fix I came up with only created more contradictions. But a few days ago, while working on the plot knot in between panels at fogcon, I came up with an idea that seems to be working. I can tell because it's reverberating all the way through the rewrite such that I'm nowhere near as confused about the story. Paragraph by paragraph, it's now a matter of seconds for me to figure out what beats to put in, which ones to take out. I know there'll be other roadblocks ahead, but I'm so thankful to be past this one. For a while there, it was looking as though I wouldn't be able to fix it.

Fogcon was great. On Friday afternoon when I arrived, I went to register. I saw my friend Ian Hagemann in the dealer's room, so I poked my head in to say hi. He said, "How come there's a Nalo Hopkinson novel that I don't know about?" I had no idea what he meant until he pointed to the book table being run by the fine folks at The Other Change of Hobbit Bookstore. They had copies of The Chaos for sale! It's not even out until April 17! It was my first time seeing the finished product. Dave Nee of the bookstore told me that they'd contacted my publisher and said the magic words; "author appearance". Simon & Schuster promptly shipped them some books in time for my honoured guest appearance at the con. Here, courtesy the bookstore, is a pic of me and Ian, seconds after he'd introduced me to my new novel:

I have more to say about Fogcon, but right now there's that little matter of a novel rewrite that needs to be completed.

Eat. Meds. Write.

I'm up to p. 102 of the rewrite. Gonna take a break for a bit. I want to do some sewing and laundry, and I want to make some notes for Tuesday's class. It's the final class of the quarter. We have no more writing to critique. Instead, I'm going to talk about the professional side of being a pop fiction writer. I've asked the students to come prepared with questions for me. I know that they will; they are an extremely diligent bunch. I'm going to do some show-and-tell; rejection letters, acceptance letters, contracts, reviews, that kind of thing. I was thinking I'd be pretty free-form, but now I'm considering organizing the discussion according to broad subject headings.

A bit from the rewrite, and please respect my copyright;